Walter Isaacson Goes Inside the Mind of Leonardo Da Vinci
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
Sure, deadlines, pressure, but honestly, it was 80% junk that had already been written in other books or articles, 10% "why are you asking these dumb questions" and only 10% actual insight.
It was a surprising weak effort is all. People expected something of more substance.
It's a shame someone like Michael Lewis wasn't at bat for that book. He seems more able to dig through the layers and find out the actual story. The New New Thing gets into fantastic detail about Jim Clark even though he's just one of the people in that book.
I also thought he did a great job with the profiles of historic computing pioneers in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. (One of the few books that users the word "hackers" properly...)
We're talking about someone who over decades had an outsized impact on Silicon Valley and computing in general, not some obscure figure that nobody ever wrote about and you'd have to go out of your way to learn more. If this was about Gordon Moore or Andy Grove you'd have a point, but it's Steve fucking Jobs. There's maybe ten people from his era that are more instantly recognizable, and those are people like Oprah Winfrey or Bill Clinton.
Isaacson's book is the Reader's Digest version of a biography. It's the WikiHow version of what should have been written.
Imagine writing a biography of Elon Musk and introducing, breathlessly, that he made his first fortune from PayPal as if people didn't know. This is that book.
Not everyone is a stalker fanboi who absorbs all trivia over years and needs a pure diet of only previously untold anecdotes.
It's also irrelevant. This ended up being some bullshit compendium when, given the unprecedented access, you'd expect better. They could've written this book based on anecdotes and old press. That's the problem.
For instance: I don’t follow football. Which means that you can pick any football celebrity in the world ever and at most — at the very most, I may be able to connect a name to the face. But I wouldn’t know what they’ve done or who they’ve played for. In the unlikely event that I would read their biography, it would be helpful to provide ample context.
Now the thing is that do the comments here help me determine if the book he wrote on da Vinci is accurate? No. Not really. Not any more than random newspaper reviewer opining on the quality of the writing.
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.
Isaacson has more likely been using his great imagination to write an exciting read. He has performed wonderfully at this in the past with other long-dead individuals. But in the cases where the person was only recently deceased and still present in first-hand memories of living individuals, Isaacson has been found to do a dismal job.
Becoming Steve Jobs is better, though.
https://daringfireball.net/2012/02/walter_isaacson_steve_job...
I believe there is an entire episode of Connected or ATP about errors in the book from when it came out.
Sloppy research, unasked questions, not talking to other primary sources. Just a GIANT missed opportunity/mistake.
Albeit there is a lot of nit picking — especially in the latter episode — his overall point is that Isaacson’s book did not use the opportunity of having access to Jobs and the people around him. Specifically he didn’t know the industry and — apparently from the book — bother to learn about it.
But relating to a bio on da Vinci? He doesn’t have exclusive access so the argument doesn’t transfer.
Hypercritical: 42: The Wrong Guy https://overcast.fm/+IplN7GcE/18:32
The asking the right questions thing doesn’t apply but the quality of research that he showed in his biography of Jobs makes me doubt the level of work/research in other biographies he writes.
Especially 2 is a part I had not read too much about, and I was really disappointed that he just kind of skipped the NeXT days.
I came to say this (or read a similar thing). Modern readers tend to think that biographies are accurate historical works. They are often not. So many events are by definition, unknown and unknowable due to the passage of time and many other factors, that most biographies belong in the class of "faction"
"... 4. Again, I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.
5. And if the fight should be at sea I have kinds of many machines most efficient for offense and defense; and vessels which will resist the attack of the largest guns and powder and fumes.
6. I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river. ..."
http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/leonardo-da-vincis-handwr...
http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/12/11/what-if-ben-were-one-...
Isaacson, who'd written a 608-page biography of Franklin, insisted that the answer was no — "not a blogger." The distinction was that Franklin "polished every word." But the question was too provocative to leave without more discussion. Ben Franklin would have a web site, Isaacson speculated. "It would be carefully crafted. It would be more like Andrew Sullivan than your normal blogger in pajamas."
What a hatchet job.
Worst mistake Jobs ever made was trusting that guy.